Murder in St Andrews

I've decided to do a series of interviews, maybe called "Tales From The Window Seat". Maybe not.   These will take you round bits of Scotland that I rarely mention. So first up is St Andrews, home of golf, men in silly trousers and some fab beaches. I spent a few childhood holidays camping up  in the hills above St Andrews. My Dad used to cheat at the Pitch and Putt. Here's the very talented Marion Todd, talking about St Andrews. If you haven't tried her books, do so now. Very elegantly written crime fiction and A Blind Eye has a very ingenious way to murder somebody. I'm never getting into a car with Marion! Here she is....she looks so sweet and gentle,  but her writing is sharp and dangerous...... There is a dark, brooding presence in the grey sandstone of
the centuries-old buildings in Saint Andrews. A presence that harks back to the
days of the Reformation, to John Knox and even to Mary Queen of Scots who is
said to have planted a thorn tree in the chapel grounds. The sixteenth century
Scottish churchman, Patrick Hamilton was among those burned at the stake
outside St Salvator’s cathedral in the town’s North Street.                                                The act was commemorated by a monogram of his initials set into the
cobbled stones outside the cathedral and students at the university avoid
stepping on the initials, said to bring bad luck in exams.                                                           

Further up North Street ghosts are believed to wander the ruins
of the ancient cathedral.                                                          

And yet the town is no backward-looking museum piece, forever
recalling the grisly events of its past. Today it is home to Scotland’s oldest
university (founded in 1410) and the town swells each year to absorb an
eclectic mix of some nine thousand students. It isn’t a campus university.
Rather, the departments are scattered across the town, occupying what at one
time would have been town houses. One of the most stunning buildings is home to
the Department of Economics and Finance, with its impressive glass-covered
entrance stairway.                                                      

The doors of the university buildings are painted in a
distinctive blue and this is reflected in the signs denoting some of the more
unusual street names in the town.                                                                                                             

Widely acknowledged, also, as the home of golf, the iconic
Old Course acts as a mecca for tourists and golfers alike and the quaintly
named Jigger Inn, at the start of the course is a popular watering hole for anybody visiting the town.                                                     

The mix of town and gown, of tourist and tradesman is a rich
one. To quote Burgess, All human life is here. And where we have life,
we have death.

I first conceived the idea of a crime series set in St
Andrews when I was watching a boxed set of Inspector Morse DVDs. The
beauty of Oxford was exploited to the full, such that the city itself became a
character in the narrative. And while Saint Andrews is much smaller, I wondered
if I could do the same with the town.

But I had reckoned without the formation in 2013 of a unified
police force, Police Scotland. Prior to its creation, Scotland had eight
regional forces, each responsible for investigating their own crimes. When
these forces merged, Major Investigation Teams were formed, operating locally
but capable of being deployed anywhere in Scotland, if required. Clearly the
days of the local Detective Inspector investigating all crimes in the area had
passed into history – not ideal for continuity in a crime fiction series. Saint
Andrews, I learned, did not even have its own DI.

So I bent the rules. I created Clare Mackay, a Detective
Inspector basing her in the town, and I gave her a team of officers who I hoped
readers would enjoy meeting, book after book. In short, I wrote my own version
of Police Scotland.

I added a Tech Support office, just twenty miles away in
Glenrothes so that laptops and mobile phones seized from victims could be
analysed speedily, and I sent my dead bodies to the mortuary in nearby Dundee.

Inevitably, some investigations require extra officers, as in
my second novel, In Plain Sight where a baby is snatched from its pram.
In such cases Clare calls on her contacts in other regions and they willingly send
reinforcements to lend a hand.

Clearly I am fudging reality here but this is what writers do.
We create worlds into which our readers can escape. Any serving police officer
will tell you that crime investigation is, to borrow a well-worn phrase, ninety-nine
percent perspiration and one percent inspiration . This would not make for
riveting reading so a healthy dose of drama is necessarily injected.

There have been many successful book and TV crime series set
in larger cities and I decided at an early stage not to try and turn Saint
Andrews into a mini Glasgow or Edinburgh, with their seedy underworlds of
organised crime. Equally, I wasn’t writing cosy crime. My aim, from the outset,
was to portray ordinary people, living ordinary lives, driven, by circumstances,
to extreme actions; because crime is about people — their lives and loves, their
devices and desires.

The area surrounding St Andrews is quite different too from
the sprawling urban settings found in other, grittier novels. Rich farmland is
peppered with small villages and market towns, some with royal connections. Falkland,
with its royal palace is a particularly lovely example. Rather than apologise
for this lack of grittiness, and try to sex the area up, I decided to embrace the
setting — to capitalise on the gentler way of life. And perhaps it is the very
tranquillity of north-east Fife that makes the crimes in my novels all the more
shocking. Yet, St Andrews, with its diverse mix of people and cultures is like
the world in miniature. Examine it through the microscope and you will find all
the elements which make up the human condition. And that is where every story
begins.                                                                                                                The Clare McKay series Marion Todd Guesting for Murder is Everywhere From the windowseat!